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Drawing on the latest ground-breaking research, and his own career-long engagement with the complexities of Irish identity, Sean Connolly reveals the forces that compelled millions of Irish men and women The 18th century to abandon their homeland, and explores their new lives in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. From Melbourne to Cape Town to Boston, these migrants and their descendants helped to settle new frontiers, industrialise the West, and spread Catholicism globally. What emerges is an Irish story, but also a chapter in world history. Irish emigrants fled a society blighted by poverty and lack of opportunity. But they also became part of a massive population movement, driven by the requirements of an ever more interconnected world economy, that transported the adventurous and the desperate to new parts of the globe. What distinguishes the Irish from tens of millions of other European immigrants is the position they established in their new homes. Initially treated as a despised and exploited underclass, they created a commanding position, in politics, in the labour movement, and, by the 20th century, as cultural icons. From his starting point in the grim realities of Great Famine and social crisis, Connolly takes the reader forward into the 20th century, when Ireland itself has become a receiver rather than an exporter of emigrants, and when a reimagined Irishness has become a commodity to be marketed to a global audience. Chapters cover nativism, civil war and the quest for acceptance, the making of Irish America, the politics of Irish America, and global Ireland reimagined. The book touches on contemporary debates about migration, as well as offering a unique and distinctive view of 200 years of Irish history. 2022 US 1st edition, 528 pages.